Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature by Diana Adesola Mafe (review)

Research in African Literatures
Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2015
pages 166-168

Tru Leverette, Associate Professor of English
University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida

Mafe, Diana Adesola, Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines (New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

In her recently published study, Diana Adesola Mafe explores the literary trope of the tragic mulatto through a comparative analysis of American and South African novels. Her work is both useful and timely, filling a gap in the literary study of colouredness and the transnational study of mixed race literature. Through this transnational lens, Mafe argues that the advent of the “age of Obama” and the renewed celebration of race mixture in the United States coincide with South Africa’s post-apartheid efforts to imagine itself as a Rainbow Nation. This celebration in both nations, however, overlooks important historical realities that are often explored through the literary figure of the tragic mulatto. Acknowledging that mulattos have often been “called upon to embody historic national moments” (1), Mafe asserts “a reading of South African fictions alongside American counterparts reveals the ongoing relevance of the tragic mulatto, which functions not only as a dated cliché and cautionary tale but also as a radical embodiment of possibility and a vehicle for social critique” (2). Indeed, Mafe illustrates through her analysis that the tragic mulatto has long functioned as a trope through which American and South African writers have critiqued race, identity, national belonging, and state-sanctioned racism.

Mafe begins her study with the introduction “Tainted Blood: The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ Tradition,” wherein she introduces the celebration of mixture within the contemporary sociopolitical contexts of the United States and South Africa. She also begins to address the tragic mulatto as a historical type. Acknowledging that, in the United States, the tragic mulatto trope developed as an abolitionist tool, Mafe briefly explores its origins in antebellum and postbellum literature. Additionally, she presents a justification for her comparative study, arguing “the tragic mulatto is a provocative keystone for analyzing these American and South African texts, which might otherwise have little else in common. When read alongside each other, these fictions expose mutual histories of stigmatization and marginalization for the mulatto figure” (14).

In chapter one, “God’s Stepchildren: The ‘Tragedy of Being a Halfbreed’ in South African Literature,” Mafe offers a history of miscegenation in South Africa and the United States, allowing her to trace the origins of the coloured and mulatto populations, respectively, in each nation. Having delineated this history, Mafe then turns her attention to the use of colouredness in South African fiction, which, she asserts, was not offered in-depth characterization until the twentieth century: “This development is inextricable from the emergence of colouredness as a ‘new’ social identity, mounting national interest in race categorization, and a literary shift from exploring Anglo-Boer relations to exploring black-white relations” (34). Through analyses of Sarah Gertrude Millin’s eugenicist novel God’s Step-Children and Peter Abrahams’s The Path of Thunder, Mafe establishes the literary origins and original uses of the tragic mulatto trope in South African literature. Throughout, she draws parallels with and highlights divergences from the use of the trope in American literature, in particular Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

In her next chapter, “‘An Unlovely Woman’: Bessie Head’s Mulatta (Re) Vision,” Mafe turns her analysis to the life and work of South African writer Bessie Head, specifically her novel A Question of Power, arguing “this text is a startling conceptualization of the mulatta that parallels but also challenges the efforts of earlier American writers” (59). Mafe explores the stereotype of the beautiful tragic mulatta and Head’s inversion of it through the presentation of an ugly protagonist, simultaneously exploring the novel’s ironic use of madness and its presentation of female sexuality. Since depictions of the tragic mulatta typically position her between the demands of white female respectability and the stereotype of black female passion, Head’s protagonist “destabilizes the exotic and erotic iconography of the mulatta, which is remarkably consistent in the American tradition” (63).

Turning from the tragic mulatta, in chapter three Mafe analyzes presentations of the mulatto man’s sexuality, again torn between “‘white’ propriety and ‘black’ passion” (86) and his filial relationship to his white father. In “‘A Little Yellow Bastard Boy’: Arthur Nortje’s Mulatto Manhood,” Mafe reads the father-son dynamic in…

Diana Mafe Publishes Book

What’s Happening
Denison University, Department of English
2013-11-18

Diana Mafe, assistant professor of English, publishes her first book.

Diana Mafe, Assistant Professor of English, has published her first book, Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). In this work, she argues that the recent celebration of the mixed race figure as an avatar of positive change for multiracial nations like South Africa and the United States overlooks the complex global trajectories that resulted in this watershed moment. She examines the popular literary stereotype of the tragic mulatto from a comparative perspective and considers the ways in which specific South African and American writers have used this controversial literary character to challenge the logic of racial categorization. The result is a transnational dialogue between these respective national literatures, both of which use tragic mulatto fiction as a locus for broader questions about race and belonging.

English prof. Diana Mafe pens literary analysis of biracial blacks

The Denisonian: Denison University’s student publication since 1857
Granville, Ohio
2013-11-19

Curtis Edmonds, Forum Editor

The United States is undoubtedly one of the most–if not the most–racially diverse country in the world, and seven percent of American children born in the last decade were bi- or multiracial. Denison English professor Diana Mafe, a Canada native, has a new book out that explores literary representations of biracial blacks in the United States and South Africa titled, “Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring outside the (Black and White) Lines.”

Mafe’s book, which was published earlier this month, is a 150-page examination of feminist and queer theory as it applies to the American “mulattos” and the South African “coloureds,” different terms for the same subject: biracial children who are the offspring of black and white parents.

The first 40 pages or so act as both a history lesson and introduction to the topic. She describes how mulattos and coloureds came to be – through consensual and nonconsensual sexual relationships between white men and black or African women as a result of colonialism and slavery…

…Today, the mulatto literary trope continues to be popular. Mafe asserts that this is because the “mulatto embodies infinite binaries.” And, she’s right. What better character type to navigate right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, than a character who literally falls in the middle?…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines

Palgrave Macmillan
November 2013
208 pages
3 illustrations
5.500 x 8.500 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-137-36492-0, ISBN10: 1-137-36492-0

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

America’s new millennial interest in multiraciality coincides with South Africa’s post-apartheid push towards greater visibility as the Rainbow Nation. Here, Diana Adesola Mafe argues that the recent celebration of the mulatto as an avatar of positive change for multiracial nations like South Africa and the United States overlooks the complex global trajectories that resulted in this watershed moment. Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature examines the popular literary stereotype, the tragic mulatto, from a comparative perspective. Mafe considers the ways in which specific South African and American writers have used this controversial literary character to challenge the logic of racial categorization. The result is a transnational dialogue between these respective national literatures, both of which use tragic mulatto fiction as a locus for broader questions about race and belonging.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Tainted Blood: The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ Tradition
• 1. God’s Stepchildren: The ‘Tragedy of Being a Halfbreed’ in South African Literature
• 2. ‘An Unlovely Woman’: Bessie Head’s Mulatta (re)Vision
• 3. ‘A Little Yellow Bastard Boy’: Arthur Nortje’s Mulatto Manhood
• 4. Tragic to Magic?: Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit
• Conclusion: Playing in the Light

Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned.

Diana Adesola Mafe, “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Volume 29, Number 1, 2009): 38-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fro.0.0004

Mixed bodies, separate races: The trope of the “(tragic) mulatto” in twentieth-century African literature

McMaster University (Canada)
2007
251 pages
AAT NR57539

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University

This dissertation proposes that the American literary trope of the “tragic mulatto” has both roots and resonances in sub-Saharan Africa. The concept of the mulatto, a person of mixed black and white heritage, as a tragic, ambiguous Other evolved primarily from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American fiction. I argue, however, that the mulatto occupies a similarly vexed discursive space in the historiography of sub-Saharan Africa and contemporary African literature. After contextualizing the American trope through such postbellum novels as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), I track the emergence of specific racially mixed populations in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of trade, migration, and colonialism. My historical survey of such mixed race communities as the Afro-Portuguese lançados of Senegambia and the Coloured people of South Africa brings to light the remarkable currency of (tragic) mulatto stereotypes across time and space. Having established the circulation of mulatto stereotypes in (pre-)colonial sub-Saharan Africa, I consider how two contemporary mixed race South African writers engage with such stereotypes in their work. This study argues that twentieth-century Coloured writers Bessie Head and Arthur Nortje realize the trope of tragic mixedness in their respective lives and writing. Head and Nortje reflect the rigid apartheid ideology of their native South Africa and assign universality to the “plight” of being mixed race in a segregationist society. But both writers also use their (gendered) identities as “tragically mixed” to challenge the policed racial categories of apartheid, subverting fixity through, paradoxical performances of Self. I conclude my study in the post-civil rights and post-apartheid arena of the twenty-first century, using my own experiences as an African “mulatta” and the current field of mixed race studies to illustrate how paradox itself is indispensable to progressive readings and imaginings of mixed race identity.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER ONE: The Evolution of the “Tragic Mulatto” Trope in American Literature: An Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO: The White Man’s “Other” Burden: (Pre-)Colonial Race Mixing in the “Dark Continent”
• CHAPTER THREE: A Mulatta in Motabeng: Bessie Head’s A Question of Power as African Tragic Mulatta Fiction
• CHAPTER FOUR: A Portrait of the (Tortured) Artist as a Young (Coloured) Man:Reading Arthur Nortje
• CHAPTER FIVE: The Premise/Promise of Paradox: Concluding Theories and Reflections from a New Millennium “Mulatta”
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

…Onwurah’s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother’s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah’s comment on “a world that sees only in black and white” is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film is any indication). But on a fundamental level, Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful remains an unusual example of a film directed by a woman of white-black racial heritage, which centralizes the consciousness of the mixed-race identity. The film delivers a rare message by encouraging viewers to challenge ethnic absolutism and essentialist codes of gender. To borrow an appropriate quotation from Françoise Lionnet, The Body Beautiful effectively “subverts] all binary modes of thought by privileging (more or less explicitly) the intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and Manichean categories collapse into each other.” And it is precisely where binaries and essentialist codes of identity are subverted that the process of identification becomes constructive, rather than a site for problematic exclusion, inclusion, and marginalization.

Diana Adesola Mafe. “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2008, Volume 29, Number 1, pages 37-50.

Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Number 1 (2008)
pages 37-50
E-ISSN: 1536-0334 Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0004

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse.

Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled-the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”21 wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned.

Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautifuloperates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.” And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences.

Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost. . . but not quite” the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity.

Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model. But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”

Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned…

Read the entire article here.

Self-made women in a (racist) man’s world: The ‘tragic’ lives of Nella Larsen and Bessie Head

English Academy Review
Volume 25, Issue 1 (May 2008)
pages 66-76
DOI: 10.1080/10131750802099490

Diana Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

(Her research aims to situate mixed race studies in a relatively unexplored sub-Saharan African context.)

Nella Larsen, the ‘mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,’ and Bessie Head, the famous ‘woman alone,’ are known for their ambiguous origins and their fabrication of personal ‘facts.’This article argues that these mixed race female writers, born under Jim Crow and apartheid respectively, carved out niches in these segregationist societies through the art of self-invention. Because of their precarious positions as ‘mulattas’ in anti-miscegenation worlds, clear parallels are identifiable between Larsen and Head, such as the creation of multiple selves and the realisation of the ‘tragic mulatto‘ stereotype through such characters as Helga Crane in Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Elizabeth in Head’s A Question of Power (1973). The representation of the ‘mulatto’ as a tragic figure caught between races is primarily an American literary trope, but both Larsen and the African-born Head evoke this stereotype in their personal and written stories. These two writers also resist labelling, however, by inventing new identities through pseudonyms, autobiographical heroines, and imagined ‘truths.’ This article examines the overt parallels between two mixed race women writers from different generations and continents, initiating crucial dialogue about the development of racial stigmas across cultures and temporalities.

Read or purchase the article here.